It’s a muggy night on Maui, but the dial
thermometer inside Darren Ho’s modest, two-room warehouse in Kahului points to
a cool seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit. Dressed in boardshorts, knee-high rubber
boots and a flimsy plastic apron, Ho emerges from a walk-in freezer wheeling a
dolly loaded with a three-hundred-pound block of ice. He hoists the giant,
homemade cube of frozen tap water onto a plywood crate and stands it upright so
that it’s level with his throat. Then, wielding a chain saw, he makes the first
cut.

“All I need is a picture,” Ho shouts over the
racket of the chain saw between cuts. “If you want a giraffe, I need a picture
of a giraffe. If you want kissing dolphins, I’ve done so many of those that I
don’t need a drawing. And with this—I’ve done so many palm trees in my career
that I can do this one from memory, too.”

One of Hawai‘i’s last remaining ice
sculptors, Ho etches the cartoonish outline of a swaying palm tree into the ice
block, sending brittle hailstones flying. Although rudimentary, the
one-dimensional design will lead to a 3-D sculpture that will endure several
hours under a punishing Hawai‘i sun without dissolving into an unidentifiable,
drippy mound. “There’s nothing worse than going to a function and having
someone say, ‘What is that supposed to be?’” Ho says.

Ice sculpting is a dying art in Hawai‘i,
where everything from the weather to the skyrocketing cost of ice blocks
threatens to thwart a pursuit so unlikely that it evokes comparison to the
Jamaican bobsled team. But ice carving in the Islands isn’t dead yet. Indeed,
Hawai‘i has its own champion carving team, which won third place this year in
the annual International Snow Sculpture Contest at the Sapporo Snow Festival in
Japan. “People ask us how we practice in Hawai‘i,” says Dale Radomski, a hotel
chef and proud member of Hawai‘i’s three-man snow carving team. “We like to
joke with them that we practice with sand.”

Popularized during the tourism boom that
followed Hawai‘i’s admission to the Union in 1959, ice carving was once a
banquet room standard at hotels. Chefs sought to wow visitors not only with
exquisite food but also with decadent displays of ice-carved angelfish, Chinese
dragons, swaying palm trees and kissing dolphins. In more recent decades, the
demand for ice sculpture has fallen as the going rate for a block of ice
climbed from less than $20 in the 1990s to upward of $100 today. This is
especially onerous when you consider that the average sculpture requires three or
four blocks of ice. “Some people just can’t see a block of ice melt away
without thinking of money going down the drain,” says Wally Nishihara, a chef
at the Hilton Garden Inn Kauai at Wailua Bay and a forty-year veteran ice
sculptor. At one time Nishihara routinely flexed his ice-carving muscles, but
these days his short-lived creations are rarely seen in the hotel dining room.
“We did a party about six months ago, and I did two lovebirds perched on a
heart,” Nishihara says. “You’ll notice I said six months ago.”

Frank Gonzales, program manager of the
continuing education culinary arts curriculum at Kapi‘olani Community College
on O‘ahu, says the college discontinued its ice sculpting class about ten years
ago because it had become too expensive to provide a classroom of culinary
students with ice blocks. As training opportunities have grown scarce, many
major hotels in Hawai‘i no longer have anyone in the kitchen who knows how to
sculpt ice, Gonzales says.

“Ice sculpting is a holdover from the ’60s
and ’70s, prior to when Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine really took hold and when a
lot of the major chefs in the Hawai‘i hotels were still European,” Gonzales
says.“At that time the chefs were French and they were German, and they brought
over a lot of the old-school, old-country traditions with them. They did petits
fours and they did chocolate fountains and they did sugar flowers and they did
ice sculptures. These were flourishes that were impressive, but they are
flourishes that are getting left behind. It’s very old-fashioned, so it’s
considered sort of passé, and it’s now become very expensive. It’s a wonderful
art, but it’s no longer a cheap amenity.”

Once a staple at birthday celebrations and
buffet tables, ice sculpture today is a premium product found mainly at
high-end weddings and corporate retreats. Still, the annual International Ice
Sculpting Exhibition and Competition at Lahaina Cannery Mall on Maui endures,
and it remains popular with spectators. But while the event used to draw
anywhere from thirteen to fifteen ice sculptors from Hawai‘i and Japan,
participation has dwindled. Last year just five competitors turned out, and
only three were from Hawai‘i. “People are giving up on it,” says Kazuo
Yamanoue, the event’s organizer.

Once a dedicated ice carver himself, Yamanoue
is among those who have given up the practice. “I retired and donated all my
equipment, my chain saw, my chisels, everything,” he says. “We used to have an
ice-sculpting association in Hawai‘i. I was the president. But it got to the point
where sometimes I would go to a meeting and no one else would show up.”

Despite the frosty outlook, there are still a
handful of diehard ice sculptors in Hawai‘i who refuse to lay down their
chainsaws. Ho is one of them. He estimates that in the last thirty years he has
carved more than five thousand ice sculptures, ranging from a life-size
Harley-Davidson to an elaborate dolphin-shaped fountain that spat a stream of
fruit punch from its mouth. “I used to do some really fun, creative things,” Ho
says. “I once carved thirty blocks of all sorts of tropical animals and things
for a forty-five-minute reception. It took me three weeks! Three weeks and it
was all over in less than an hour. Today nobody’s spending money like that.”

Corporate logos are the big thing nowadays.
Ninety percent of Ho’s current business consists of logos commissioned by
international insurance, pharmaceutical and tech companies holding corporate
retreats in Hawai‘i. “I rarely do a ten-year-old’s birthday party anymore,” he
says. “Not after I tell them how much it’s going to cost.”

While ice sculptors in places like Alaska and
Russia are accustomed to working with mammoth blocks of crystal-clear ice cut
from frozen rivers, Hawai‘i’s carvers are ice-block-impoverished underdogs
struggling against the odds to practice their art. And yet in 2017, after a
dozen years of falling short, Team Hawai‘i won bronze at Sapporo Snow Festival.

Suited in snow pants and ski jackets, the
trio of local chefs arrived at the wintry city square that serves as Japan’s
world-famous competition grounds and sized up their blank canvas: a ten-foot
cube of densely packed snow, excavated from the mountains just outside Sapporo
and as white as cotton. Armed with scaffolding, ladders and a small arsenal of
homemade hand tools, Team Hawai‘i turned its block into a work of art over the
course of four back-to-back twelve-hour days. Sculpting snow is different from
sculpting ice. Snow is much softer and more malleable. It’s also more prone to
cave in from a carving mistake. Because a chain saw could obliterate the
snowpack, power tools are forbidden at the International Snow Sculpture
Contest. Instead, Team Hawai‘i used sharpened shovels to make bold cuts and ice
fishing augers to make precision cuts. Cheese graters added texture and the
illusion of movement. Sandpaper helped smooth out the snow.

Team members Radomski and Norimitsu
Wada-Goode of the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Waikiki and Charlie Matsuda of the
St. Regis Princeville Resort on Kaua‘i had participated in the festival for
more than a decade without winning a medal. Over the years, however, they
learned a thing or two about what kind of sculpture appeals the most to the
judges. As Radomski recalls: “We had done surfing geckos. One year it was a
hula dancer with an owl on her arm. We did a pig hunter one year. We did
dolphins. We did turtles.” None of these wowed the judges. “The judges have
seen a dolphin a thousand times, so this year we decided to do something a
little more contemporary and abstract.” Thus was born “Dancing in the Clouds,
Hawaiian Style,” a cutout of a classic Hawaiian hula girl fringed by an
ethereal pair of modern hula dancers, their skirts and limbs were so expertly
shaped and textured they appeared to be frozen in motion.

“It was clean and it was simple,” Radomski
says. “Like a diamond, you don’t want to be making a lot of intricate cuts. You
want it to be simple so that when the light hits it right, it just shines. We
didn’t want to be adding ten thousand little details. We wanted it to look like
when you’re looking up at the sky and you start to see shapes in the clouds,
and you can make them out but they aren’t really clear—maybe you see one thing,
and I see something else.” The work won Team Hawai‘i a bronze medal and a trip
to the podium, where they stood beside teams from snowy Latvia (silver) and
Macau (gold).

Back in Kahului, Ho maneuvers his chain saw
with the precision of an orchestra conductor wielding a baton. With each slash
of the roaring saw and every scrape of the die grinder, his icy palm tree, a
commission for a corporate client, morphs from a one-dimensional etching into a
3-D emblem of tropical paradise. Finally, he saws the sculpture in half,
splitting the glistening tree into an identical set of tabletop palms. He loads
them onto the dolly and rolls them into the freezer, where they will remain in
storage until the date of a corporate event at the Grand Wailea.

Ho, whose fee for a one-block carving has
soared from $175 in the 1990s to more than $800 today, is the only person in
Hawai‘i making a full-time living from ice sculpting. After three decades of
making art from ice, he is eager to retire, but he fears the art of ice carving
in Hawai‘i could die off without him unless he finds a protégé to take over his
four-hundred-sculpture-a-year business.

The closest Ho’s come to finding a
replacement is an eighth-grade girl from Maui. He had the girl practice on
Styrofoam first. Then he trained her with a chain saw and ice. After a short
series of lessons, the young student successfully carved a leaf from a block of
ice all on her own. The feat surprised the student but not the teacher. Anyone
can learn to carve an ice sculpture, Ho insists. A passion to learn is the only
requirement. “Everyone calls me an artist, but it’s really so simple,” he says.
“If I carved these palm trees out of wood, people would think it’s boring. But
because it’s ice, everyone thinks it’s supercool.”